Page 55 →Three “Self-Emancipating Women”

The five-month-long World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a defining commemorative event for both White and Black Americans. It attracted between twenty million and twenty-seven million attendees to its “White City,” which occupied prime real estate near the Chicago lakefront.¹⁵ Chicago city leaders recognized the exhibition as a singular opportunity to prove the significance of their emerging metropolis. As historian Christopher Robert Reed noted, the Chicago World’s Fair also provided an important opportunity for African Americans to prove themselves as a race. Most African Americans—particularly leaders and the elite—were keen to demonstrate their achievements since emancipation.¹⁶ The Fair presented the chance to commemorate “a generation of freedom” and to invite White Americans into “an important ritual of national redemption” for the sin of slavery.¹⁷ These hopes and expectations led to enthusiastic involvement and effort among Black Americans, despite their being systematically excluded from top-level Fair planning. In fact, Black Americans attended the Fair, worked at the Fair, organized state exhibits, displayed the work of Black universities, gathered in the Haitian Pavilion, showed up for “Colored American Day,” participated in auxiliary events and congresses, and even publicly criticized the event. The most notorious critique came from journalist Ida B. Wells and the coauthors of her pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.¹⁸ Although the hoped-for Page 59 →redemption did not materialize, it was certainly not due to Black Americans’ absence or their failure to call White Americans to repentance.

Recognizing the significance of the event, Black women worked strenuously—and ultimately, unsuccessfully—for representation in Fair planning. Black women, both collectively and individually, appealed to the Fair’s Board of Lady Managers (BLM) to appoint a Black woman to its ranks.¹⁹ Several groups were formed to advance this purpose, each reflecting a different “procedural” strategy for seeking Black representation.²⁰ White BLM chairwoman Mrs. Parker Palmer, however, excluded these groups by reducing their differences of opinion to mere “quarreling.”²¹ Individual Black women such as Hallie Quinn Brown also lobbied for inclusion. After she turned down the small clerical position that the Board offered her in 1892, Brown wrote to the BLM, arguing that if their goal was “to present to the world the industrial and educational progress of the bread winners—the wage women—how immeasurably incomplete will that work be without the exhibit of the thousands of the colored women of this country.”²² Unfortunately, Brown’s argument exposing the Board’s hypocrisy did not effect change: Only two Black women—Fannie Barrier Williams and A. M. Curtis—were employed at the national level, and each only temporarily.²³ The dearth of Black female leadership in the WCRW meant that the Black women speakers were one of very few visible groups of women of their race sanctioned by the Fair.²⁴ Their position offered the opportunity to remedy White ignorance about the lives of Black women and to critique assumptions about White superiority, yet they had to temper the views in their speeches sufficiently to garner the support of sympathetic White women.²⁵

These six “true race women” were among what Brittney Cooper has identified as the “first Black women intellectuals.”²⁶ As Jacqueline Jones Royster explained, “This generation of African-American women recognized the burdens they carried in the interest of the race,” and “used their rhetorical abilities” to advance those interests in public spaces.²⁷ Before the Congress, the Black women who were WCRW speakers had established themselves as leaders, thinkers, and teachers. The sixty-eight-year-old writer and speaker Frances E. W. Harper would likely have been the best known to the international WCRW audience. Born to free parents in Maryland in 1825, Harper was orphaned very young and subsequently raised and educated by relatives. She participated in the abolition, woman suffrage, and temperance movements and published poetry and fiction.²⁸ The lesser-known Early was born in 1825 to free parents in Ohio and spent her Page 60 →life as a teacher and temperance lecturer. Born into slavery in 1837, Fanny Jackson Coppin became free when an aunt purchased her freedom. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1865 and spent her career as a teacher, African Methodist Episcopal church leader, clubwoman, and missionary.²⁹ The three youngest women—Williams, Cooper, and Brown—were all born around midcentury. Williams was raised in a well-to-do free family in upstate New York, and she later married prominent Chicago journalist S. Laing Williams. Reed explained that her status in Chicago’s community of “refined” African Americans made her “one of the most prominent African Americans, regardless of gender, to represent the race” at the Fair.³⁰ Williams, therefore, would have been most familiar to the Congress attendees who hailed from Chicago and the Midwest. Cooper, on the other hand, was born to an enslaved mother in North Carolina around 1858. After earning a degree from Oberlin College, she pursued a career in education. Her essay collection, A Voice from the South, appeared the year before the Fair.³¹ Born in the late 1840s to free parents in Pittsburgh, Brown was a “charismatic public speaker, teacher, and civil and women’s rights advocate.”³² She graduated from Wilberforce University in 1873, where she later served on the faculty. In May of 1893, she had recently concluded a year as Lady Principal at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Together, these women, as Brittney Cooper put it, endeavored to “shift public perception and ideas about African-American women through their work on the public stage.”³³ As individuals, their views differed in subtle ways that affected each one’s unique approach to the rhetorical challenges of the Fair and their enactment of Black feminist ideals.

Convened to “celebrate progress in the New World” by commemorating the arrival of Columbus, the Chicago World’s Fair and its attendant congresses advanced stories of progress marked by the timeline of White colonialism.³⁴ Kristy Maddux has explained how those stories were racialized: “As [the Fair’s narrative] demonstrated the progress of humanity from savagery and barbarity to civilization, it used people of color to demonstrate the first two categories and white men to demonstrate the third.”³⁵ Theories of evolutionary progress drove those narratives and imbued them with scientific authority. Perhaps for this reason, these theories made “measuring racial progress,” as David Blight explained, into “a major preoccupation in black America around the turn of the century.”³⁶ African Americans’ Page 61 →accounts of their progress most commonly began with the “zero point” of emancipation.³⁷ These six speakers reframed the commemorative moment of the Congress by identifying emancipation as the starting point for their accounts of progress. Marking emancipation as the zero point enabled these speakers both to distinguish the present from a past characterized by enslavement and to commemorate emancipation as a moment of possibility. Furthermore, as Maddux pointed out, such rhetorical work “manipulated the chronology of evolutionary progress” and “gave African American women’s progress a compressed timeline” so that their achievements were being assessed according to their own self-defined temporality.³⁸ Although their individual yardsticks differed slightly, the Black WCRW speakers together insisted on commemorating emancipation as the appropriate starting point for their work.

Delivering the first of the six speeches, Williams tried to correct Whites’ misguided views on Black women’s progress by informing them of the changes wrought by emancipation. Williams was uniquely equipped both to diagnose and remedy White misconceptions, because of her prominence among the Black elite and recognition in White society. As one writer for the Plaindealer, the Detroit newspaper, noted in a March 1893 piece about the World’s Fair, “All who know Mrs. Williams’s ability to think clearly and write forcibly will feel confident that the Colored Woman’s [sic] cause will be worthily represented.”³⁹ Williams indeed argued clearly and forcibly throughout her speech that Black women’s progress should be assessed using the temporal marker of emancipation. She began by asserting that the system of slavery had rendered it impossible even to apply the term “progress” to Black women; before emancipation, such progress “would have been an anomaly.”⁴⁰ Although emancipation, in her view, had since made progress possible, many White Americans remained oblivious to its impact. Williams exclaimed, “How few of the happy, prosperous, and eager living Americans can appreciate what it all means to be suddenly changed from irresponsible bondage to the responsibility of freedom and citizenship!”⁴¹ While noting their ignorance about emancipation and its effect on Black women, Williams softened her criticism of White listeners by referring to them as “happy, prosperous, and eager.” Williams developed that idea later in the speech by observing how the contrasting realities of Blacks and Whites yielded divergent experiences of the moment of emancipation. Black Americans entering the “new life of freedom” had launched “a distinctly new era in their career,” whereas White Americans struggled to accept the new reality.⁴² Williams simultaneously emphasized how swiftly Black people had improved their condition after emancipation and provided cover for her White audience by saying that such improvement had occurred “so quickly that the American mind has scarcely had time to recognize the fact, and adjust itself.”⁴³ The moment of emancipation had inaugurated a “new life” and “new era” for Black Americans, yet it remained unacknowledged by White people. To improve the chance that this message would be received, Williams portrayed White listeners as well-intentioned observers simply in need of information.

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Having diagnosed White American ignorance about Black women, Williams posited the moment of emancipation as a temporal break that demanded new definitions and judgments of progress. For instance, Williams argued that Black women should be judged “not by the standards of slavery, but by the higher standards of freedom and of twenty-five years of education, culture, and moral contact.”⁴⁴ Williams insisted that Black women be measured by metrics of their own choosing rather than by the outdated assumptions of White Americans. That new metric was built on a temporal shift between slavery and freedom marked by emancipation. Williams then used the starting point of emancipation to reframe Black women’s progress in relation to White women. She observed, “The path of progress in the Page 63 →picture [of enslaved women] is enlarged so as to bring to view these trustful and zealous students of freedom and civilization striving to overtake and keep pace with women whose emancipation has been a slow and painful process for a thousand years.”⁴⁵ This subtle comparison with White women implies that Black women would emerge favorably as they strove not only to “keep pace with” but also to possibly overtake White women who had had more time to improve their condition. By describing Black women as “striving to overtake,” Williams projected their progress onto a future horizon. In contrast, Williams bound White women to the past by describing the “slow and painful process” that had already trudged on for a millennium. When marked by the zero point of emancipation, Black women’s progress could be said to have outstripped that of White women, according to Williams.⁴⁶ This comparison furthermore distinguishes the histories of Black women and White women, performing a restrained form of intersectional critical memory work.

Cooper’s response to Williams likewise established emancipation as a turning point to reframe the White audience’s understanding of Black women’s progress. Roundly rejecting any definition of progress that judged Black women solely by their trajectory since emancipation, Cooper declared that a “brief space of thirty years” would be insufficient for any group to spontaneously attain the “higher fruits of civilization.” Such work, instead, demands “the long and painful growth of generations.”⁴⁷ Her portrayal here more forcefully echoes Williams’s comparison with White women’s thousand-year labor for rights. Unlike Williams, Cooper characterized emancipation as the first step on a crucial yet uncertain path rather than as an instant of revelatory clarity. She eschewed a linear progress narrative, saying, “Since emancipation the movement has been at times confused and stormy, so that we could not always tell whether we were going forward or groping in a circle.”⁴⁸ Cooper thus challenged White assumptions that progress followed a linear course marked by certain signs of “improvement.” Cooper remarked that, despite uncertainty about their future, Black Americans maintained a “simple faith” that God “would in his own good time make all right that seemed most wrong.”⁴⁹ Although the outcome of any “progress” since emancipation would be revealed only in the divinely appointed future, Cooper drew attention to the ways Black people had filled the time since emancipation with the activity of growth. Cooper then grounded her argument by using the familiar biblical metaphor of yeast from a New Testament parable, describing the work of Black schools as “the little leaven hid in the measure of meal, permeating life throughout the length and breadth Page 64 →of the Southland.”⁵⁰ Cooper perceived the potential of the enslaved during the time of their bondage, represented by the “little leaven” that was “hid” in the meal until the moment of emancipation. This metaphor represented education as a power that expanded and filled the new era for a people who had previously endured restriction and emptiness. Although “leaven” and “meal” may seem like innocuous domestic references, using this language subtly invokes the parable’s subversive context: Jesus deployed it to confront and confound the Pharisees, powerful religious leaders who sought to suppress his radical actions. In this context, the allusion to the leaven suggests that Black education would expand geographically, throughout the South, and also temporally, into the future wherever Black communities could access it.

Coppin’s speech dwells less on the moment of emancipation, yet it also characterizes that moment as pivotal for understanding Black women’s progress. Near her conclusion, Coppin noted that both women and Black people who pursued schooling were often asked: “What are you going to do with an education?” She traced this question to emancipation, recognizing Page 65 →that African Americans encountered this question only “when the days of slavery were over, and we wanted an education.”⁵¹ Like Williams, Coppin noted that perspectives on emancipation diverged sharply along racial lines. Those who “classed [African Americans] among the working people”—that is, White Americans—viewed emancipation as the uneventful continuation of Black manual labor in service of White capital, whereas African Americans viewed it as a dramatic turning point toward Black agency. Coppin thus portrayed emancipation as a break with the past, as a moment of transformation. Within this framework, Coppin assumed rather than argued that Black women had made progress. This assumption enabled her to present an a fortiori argument that challenged White women’s understanding of their own progress: If Black women have advanced in spite of their oppression, Coppin argued, then White women should be expected to advance so much more when faced with fewer obstacles.⁵² For instance, Coppin began by asserting, “For if we have been able to accomplish anything whatever in what are considered the higher studies, or if we have been able to achieve anything by heroic living and thinking, all the more can you achieve it.”⁵³ This a fortiori structure inverted the claim that Black women ought to be measured against White women (as Williams sometimes implied), instead urging White women to measure their own ignorance and inertia against the rapid and improbable progress of Black women.⁵⁴ Although Coppin did not dwell on emancipation as an event, her argument about progress is predicated on its function as a transformative moment. Coppin thus continued the critical memory work begun by Williams and Cooper before her: She argued that Black women’s progress should be remembered not as deficient but as different from White women’s progress.

Early and Brown, focusing on Black women in the South, likewise established emancipation as a definitive moment for understanding progress. Instead of comparing Black women with White women, Early and Brown compared Black women of 1893 with those of 1865. Early deployed statistical evidence and serial examples to demonstrate how Black women had organized themselves. She then proceeded to “compare the present condition of the colored people of the South with their condition twenty-eight years ago” to show “how the organized efforts of their women have contributed to the elevation of the race and their marvelous advancement in so short a time.”⁵⁵ Like Cooper, Early contrasted the abundance of these twenty-eight years with the impoverished centuries of slavery, and she dramatized this contrast through a series of antitheses between Black women past and present.⁵⁶ Recognizing the prejudices of her audience, she noted Page 66 →that “these feeble efforts” might “seem insignificant to the world” but that they foreshadowed even better things to come.⁵⁷

Brown’s response likewise testifies to Black women’s progress since emancipation, but her argument insists even more forcefully that Black women be judged only according to their own timeline. Marking time appears to be particularly important to Brown, who made numerous temporal references throughout her brief address.⁵⁸ Portraying the last days of enslavement as a period of prophetic anticipation, Brown quoted Harper’s poem “Ethiopia” to portray emancipation as the result of the humble supplication of Black people and God’s righteous redemption. Emancipation instantly revived Black women to consciousness: “With freedom’s first sweet draught came the thirst for knowledge,” and “the drowsy intellect awoke” to its own powers.⁵⁹ Brown urged the audience to weigh two hundred fifty years of enslavement against the brief span of freedom so that they, too, might be in awe of Black women’s achievements since their moment of liberation. For Brown, as for many Black Americans since, a fair assessment of the progress of Black Americans in the present depended on an accurate understanding of their past. Rather than plead for acknowledgment, Brown boldly Page 67 →declared, “Twenty-five years of progress find the Afro-American woman advanced beyond the most sanguine expectations” to become “one of the marvels of the age.”⁶⁰ Brown concluded her address by characterizing this short span of time as “but a day” in the “history of a nation.”⁶¹ By measuring Black women’s few years of freedom against the epic history of nations, Brown simultaneously magnified their marvelous achievements and challenged White temporalities of progress. She concluded by rebuking those who would judge Black women’s progress by improper standards, exhorting the audience to “talk not of the negro woman’s incapacity, of her inferiority, until the centuries of her hideous servitude have been succeeded by centuries of education, culture, and refinement.”⁶² Brown refused to measure the Black woman’s progress against the White woman’s; she pointed instead back to the zero point of emancipation and forward into Black women’s future. Black women’s progress would only truly be made manifest, Brown argued, in a yet-unrealized future.

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Harper’s speech focuses least on commemorating emancipation as the zero point for progress. Although Harper also cast a future-oriented vision for progress, her temporal framework applied deliberately to all women. Harper spoke of a new time not only punctuated by the point of emancipation but also characterized by the emerging views of empowered women of all races throughout the United States. In her single reference to emancipation, Harper used strategic ambiguity to gesture toward Black freedom without mentioning it directly. Here, she claimed that woman’s advancement up to that point “bears the promise of the rising of the full-orbed sun of emancipation.”⁶³ Her reference to the light of emancipation could have been interpreted generally to apply to all women or specifically by Black women listeners to mean the end of enslavement. Either way, emancipation is represented as a time marking the promise of future progress.

Together, these speakers argued that an accurate understanding of Black women’s “progress” required a temporal framing that accounted for the history-altering moment of emancipation. Each woman’s position—both in life and in the Congress—influenced her specific claims about time. Page 69 →Yet all of these speakers argued that, regardless of their own relationships to slavery, the progress of Black women could only be meaningfully measured from the point at which they all became free under the law, and it could only be understood as unfolding along a horizon of radical possibility. Almost ignoring Christopher Columbus altogether, the Black female speakers instead commemorated emancipation, thereby rejecting White Americans’ colonizing historical narratives. Each of the speakers thus became what Mitch Kachun described as an “advocate of a positive historical interpretation” of emancipation.⁶⁴ Marking the moment of emancipation, however, also entailed certain memories of enslavement, to which I now turn.

The Black women speakers at the WCRW addressed their White audiences at a watershed moment in the development of American memories of slavery. Much of the “Civil War nostalgia” of the twenty-first century is “rooted in the fateful memory choices made in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century,” according to Blight.⁶⁵ By that time, narratives of sectional reconciliation had produced the popular White memory of slavery as “an Page 70 →inoffensive institution,” in which Black Americans were imagined as “faithful, devoted slaves [. . .] who were content with white supremacy.”⁶⁶ African Americans, meanwhile, deliberated about whether to forget what was considered by some to be a shameful history of enslavement or to advocate for more and more accurate memories of the institution to combat harmful White accounts.⁶⁷ Thus, addressing a primarily White immediate audience at the Congress afforded the Black women speakers an opportunity both to counter White narratives and to represent Black memories of enslavement as a preferable alternative. Although none of the women had been asked to speak directly about the institution of slavery, all of them referred to it explicitly and thereby destabilized whitewashed memories of benevolent masters and happy slaves. These Black women denounced the system of slavery—and, in some cases, its White participants—and remembered enslavement as a time of absence and lack.⁶⁸ The Black WCRW speakers could only speak of “progress” once they had properly remembered that from which enslaved Black Americans had been emancipated.

First speaker Williams framed subsequent speeches by arguing that enslavement left both Black and White Americans wanting: White people lacked knowledge about Black people, and enslaved Black Americans had lacked opportunities for moral action. Utilizing her prominent social position, Williams cultivated trust with her White audience by acknowledging their discomfort with memories of slavery. “While I duly appreciate the offensiveness of all references to American slavery,” she explained, “it is unavoidable” when addressing the question of African American “progress.”⁶⁹ Williams recognized White feelings while not allowing them to dictate her effort to privilege Black memories of slavery. By yielding both to Victorian social norms and to White sensitivities—what today we might call “White fragility”—Williams bolstered her credibility with her White audience. Listeners who imagined themselves open-minded may also have viewed her candor as a sign of reliability.

Williams remembered enslavement as a system that victimized Black women by depriving them of the context for virtuous and moral action. Inhibited by “two centuries of ill-treatment” and the “long-enforced degradation” of slavery, Black women suffering enslavement became “children of darkness.”⁷⁰ The institution of slavery, in Williams’s view, systematically denied enslaved women the rightful human experience of intimate relationships that could cultivate virtue and morality. She claimed that “the mean vocabulary of slavery” supplied “no definition of any of the virtues of life.”⁷¹ Plainly assigning blame, Williams declared that it was “unavoidable Page 71 →to charge to that system every moral imperfection that mars the character of the colored American” because “the whole life and power of slavery depended upon an enforced degradation of everything human in the slaves.”⁷² Williams argued that any deficiency on the part of Black women resulted from slavery as a system of deprivation rather than from their innate character or biology, as the White audience may have assumed. According to Kristy Maddux, racial uplift discourses like Williams’s often reframed Black people’s supposed inferiority from biological—a common White view—to environmental.⁷³ Blaming the institution of slavery enabled Williams to vindicate Black women themselves, to some extent, without explicitly accusing White listeners of being complicit in that system.⁷⁴ As the first of the Black women speakers, Williams may have risked alienating most of her White audience had she blamed White people rather than the institution of slavery for its degradations.

Cooper’s response both reinforced and complicated Williams’s memory of enslavement and her representation of enslaved Black women. Although Cooper likewise characterized slavery as a time of absence for Black women, she pushed beyond victimhood to praise Black women’s dignity as survivors. Cooper argued that the system of slavery had left Black women “utterly destitute,”⁷⁵ which allowed Whites to dismiss them as “no more than a chattel, an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither or thither at the volition of an owner.”⁷⁶ Although admitting, like Williams, that emancipation revealed disadvantages attributable to the circumstances of enslavement, Cooper countered Whites’ extreme belittling of Black women by detailing their plight. She explained that emancipation found newly freed people with “no homes nor the knowledge of how to make them, no money nor the habit of acquiring it, no education, no political status, no influence.”⁷⁷ Despite being deprived of these basic rights, Cooper argued, most enslaved Black women—especially mothers—maintained their dignity by engaging in a “heroic struggle” to survive.⁷⁸ Cooper, who had been born into slavery, subtly amended Williams’s more privileged views by imbuing memories of enslavement with a more intimate account of the struggles faced by enslaved women. Although Cooper did not directly address the differences in social status between her and Williams, it is plausible that she used her speech to offer a more sympathetic account than what the elite Williams could provide.

The speeches by Early and Brown also portrayed enslavement as a time of oppression characterized by lack. Early used fraught yet familiar light–dark metaphors to convey this absence. To Early, enslavement was “the Page 72 →long night of oppression, which shrouded their minds in darkness, crushed the energies of their soul, robbed them of every inheritance save their trust in God.”⁷⁹ Enslavement thus became an oppressive absence of light that “shrouded,” “crushed,” and “robbed.” Like Cooper, Early emphasized that slavery actively stole material and immaterial resources from the enslaved, who, when emancipated, “found themselves penniless, homeless, destitute . . . poverty and inexperience prevailing everywhere.”⁸⁰ This profound privation had left enslaved people in what Early characterized as a “condition of helplessness and destitution.”⁸¹ By symbolizing slavery as a thief, Cooper and Early denied the notion, popular among Whites, that enslaved people benefited from their bondage. Coppin’s and Harper’s speeches made similar use of the “thief” metaphor by noting how slavery had robbed enslaved people of an education.⁸² These speeches remember slavery as a time of lack not primarily to elicit pity for Black women but to contextualize Black women’s progress within a long history of oppression.

Brown’s address amplifies such memories of enslavement by vividly describing Black women’s experiences, rejecting slanderous misrepresentations of those women, and condemning slavery’s White perpetrators. She opened by quantifying the time of enslavement and exposing its crass economics, stating, “For two hundred and fifty years the negro woman of America was bought and sold as chattel.”⁸³ Unusually plain for the dramatic elocutionist, this sentence bluntly confronted the audience with the stark historical reality of a system that regarded people as property. Brown then detailed how slavery deprived women of relationships, resources, and reputation. Their “sacred ties” with others were “broken and disdained,” they were “said to possess neither a brain nor a soul,” they suffered “every privation,” and ultimately experienced “a helplessness born of despair.”⁸⁴ Brown represented White perpetrators of slavery—the “so-called master” and the “slave-driver”—as working actively to dispossess enslaved women of their labor and their dignity.⁸⁵ Brown thus attributed responsibility for Black women’s oppression to individual White figures exercising unrightful authority (“so-called”). She also directly correlated the enslaved woman’s deprivation and the White man’s enrichment. Active verb choices dramatize the ways in which labor stolen from Black women generated bounteous gain for White enslavers. The Black woman “toiled,” and “tilled,” “enlarged . . . estates,” “heaped . . . coffers,” and “filled” the slaveholder’s home with “the splendors of the world.”⁸⁶ Brown’s descriptive language strikingly recalls enslavement as an inequitable time of absence for Black women and conspicuous abundance for White enslavers. Elsewhere, Brown compared slavery with sleep, Page 73 →a time during which the powers of the enslaved were not altogether absent but simply dormant.⁸⁷

Williams, Cooper, Coppin, Early, Brown, and Harper collectively argued that audiences hoping to understand Black women’s “progress” must remember slavery as a system that, for hundreds of years, deprived Black women of material possessions, intellectual opportunities, and—in some characterizations—moral guidance. Although the speeches shared this central theme, the women’s views were by no means monolithic. For instance, northern socialite Williams viewed enslavement as a time of moral stasis, whereas formerly enslaved Southerner Cooper represented slavery as a time of painful but courageous struggle. However, working together in sequence, these speakers insisted that any assessment of Black women’s efforts, achievements, and progress must accurately account for the legacy of slavery. These women’s critical memory work also roundly rejected whitewashed public memories that recalled benevolent masters and happy slaves, along with the inherent racism of those memories. Furthermore, by remembering enslavement as lack, absence, and negation, they also implied that it was a time of suppressed possibility, of pent-up potential poised to act.

By commemorating emancipation and remembering enslavement, the Black WCRW speakers both enacted agency and recentered the agency of Black women in accounts of their progress. The speakers built on their accounts of the past to develop future-oriented temporalities of progress that hinged on Black women’s actions. These speakers argued both that Black women possessed an innate desire to improve their situation and that Black women consistently and successfully acted on their own behalf in ways that would continue into the future. The six WCRW speeches anticipated twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black feminist thought by arguing that Black women’s agency is embodied, self-determined, and future-oriented, features that I discussed in chapter 1. Additional commentary from contemporary Black feminist scholars illuminates how these features are expressed in the WCRW speeches. First, as Brittney Cooper explained in her work on “race women” of the same era, “the black female body takes center stage in much of the thought work produced by Black women, as they discuss the material effects of poor social conditions on African American life chances.”⁸⁸ Shardé Davis has noted that Black feminist thought builds on the knowledge produced by those embodied experiences to portray “Black women as self-defined individuals whose conscious understanding of their Page 74 →own standpoint serves as a tool of resistance against the dehumanizing definitions of Black womanhood.”⁸⁹ Finally, Black feminist thought, as Jennifer Nash has argued, is strongly oriented toward future action. What Nash calls “Black feminist love politics” has “long been invested in the ‘open end,’ in radical possibility, orienting itself toward a yet-unknown future.”⁹⁰ The WCRW speakers both enacted and elucidated these features of agency to show how Black women’s action produced past progress and pointed toward future progress.

First, these women enacted embodied agency by simply appearing in their Black female bodies on stage at the Congress. Their verbal arguments supported the visual arguments of their bodies; they drew attention to their own bodies as sites of agency and told stories of how other Black women actively resisted attacks on their bodies. Although her elite status and light skin shielded Williams from some discrimination, Williams nonetheless recognized the effects of embodied experience on (relatively) privileged Black women. For instance, Williams testified to racial discrimination by telling about “a bright young woman” whom she recommended for employment at a bank in Chicago. Although the applicant had been initially judged by the bank president as “exceptionally qualified,” she was ultimately passed over by the board of directors because they “scented the African taint” of her “blood.”⁹¹ Williams thus attributed this injustice to the board members’ racial prejudice, declaring that “no other question but that of color determined the actions of these men.”⁹² Her use of vivid sensory language bolsters her claim that Black women faced embodied forms of discrimination. However, Williams also implied that, although Black women’s bodies had often been sites for enforcing White male supremacy, their bodies were also sources of knowledge and potential action.

Anna Julia Cooper’s speech turns from the embodied experiences and agency of middle-class Black women to those of enslaved women. Cooper argued that such women engaged in a “heroic struggle” for control over their own bodies and those of their children despite “fearful and overwhelming odds.” Although she described the struggle as “heroic,” Cooper refused to romanticize it by admitting that “the majority of our women are not heroines.” Then Cooper visualized this struggle as “the painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a free simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the despairing fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons.”⁹³ Cooper acknowledged the difficulty that Black mothers faced in protecting their bodies and those of their children while sidestepping a direct discussion of rape. Using words such as “painful,” Page 75 →“toil” and “fight” also emphasized the exhausting effort to guard against such violations. If undertaken by a less credible rhetor, comparing an enslaved mother with an animal may risk further dehumanizing her. However, Cooper’s sympathetic image of the noble tigress evokes dignity and physical strength not often ascribed to Black women.

Brown’s speech makes perhaps the most compelling case for the embodied agency of Black women. A noted teacher of elocution and physical culture, Brown deliberately drew attention both to her own body as a visual representation of her young Black students and to her attire as evidence of their skilled physical labor. In the second half of the speech, Brown identified her relationship to those women, saying, “I have come to this Congress to represent the women of the black belt of Alabama.”⁹⁴ She outlined her role as the present, embodied emissary of a group of absent Southern Black women—her charges in her position as Tuskegee’s Lady Principal. She then presented her body and its clothing as evidence of the women’s agency, saying, “And if you would have a slight idea of the work they [the students] can do, they instructed me to say that you should look at the gown their representative wears, made by girls who six months ago could handle only the hoe and the plow.”⁹⁵ By mentioning the dress, Brown emphasized her presence while also praising the physical labor and technical expertise of the Tuskegee students. Brown’s comment amplifies the abilities of Black women by noting that these students had mastered their craft in a mere six months. The dress thus demonstrates both the young women’s desire and talent for self-improvement.

The speeches also demonstrate the significance of self-definition or self-determination to Black women’s agency. Specifically, they argue that Black women—both as individuals and as groups—determined and drove their own actions. Insisting on the Black woman as a vector of agency enabled these speakers to refute the popular notion that she was, as Anna Julia Cooper put it, merely “an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither or thither at the volition” of a White agent.⁹⁶ The speeches represent Black women as agents in part by frequently appending the prefix “self” to certain actions or qualities. For instance, Williams characterized Black women as “self-emancipating”⁹⁷ and praised their abilities to demonstrate “the power of self-help.”⁹⁸ Cooper also cited Black women’s “organized efforts for self-help.”⁹⁹ Coppin emphasized self-determination by debunking the racist myth that any intellectual achievements of Black Americans resulted from their “natural” penchant for mimicry.¹⁰⁰ Blacks’ educational aspirations “did not come out of wanting to imitate anyone whatever” but rather “grew Page 76 →out of the uneasiness and the restlessness of the desires we felt within us; the desire to know.”¹⁰¹ According to Coppin, African Americans—including women—possessed a natural desire for knowledge that led them to pursue education. Black women were neither dependent on the charity of White women nor desiring to emulate them. Rather, the engines of Black women’s progress resided within themselves.

Early’s speech, “The Organized Efforts of the Colored Women of the South to Improve Their Condition,” provides the most sustained attention to self-determined agency. Marking emancipation as the point of departure, Early explained that “the first impulse” of the newly-free was “to improve their social condition,” which led them “immediately to organize themselves” to improve their communities.¹⁰² She then focused specifically on Black women, who had organized with “wonderful wisdom and forethought.” After describing the fruits of this organizing, Early concluded that “our people have shown a self-dependence scarcely equaled by any other people.”¹⁰³ Early not only rejected the paternalistic myth that Blacks depended on Whites for survival, but she also asserted that Black people were more self-sufficient than other groups. More than any other speaker, Early supported her claims about self-determination with statistical evidence, pointing out that women’s associations numbered “at least five thousand” and that their membership included “at least a half-million women.”¹⁰⁴ This widespread self-organization of Black women, Early argued, “has taught them the art of self-government.”¹⁰⁵ Like Brown, Early strongly implied that Black women were especially adept at acquiring new skills and knowledge—clear signs of self-determined agency.

These speeches also point repeatedly to Black women’s future action as a promise of future progress. Having remembered emancipation and enslavement, the speakers practiced what Nash described as “educated hope” by projecting their agential vision into the future.¹⁰⁶ For instance, Williams argued that, if Black women were granted “the same opportunity” as other women, they would quickly rise to influential positions and achievements.¹⁰⁷ Williams’s speech also clearly illustrates how the women tied future progress to their accounts of the past, as when she reasoned, “If this hope seems too extravagant to those of you who know these women only in their humbler capacities, I would remind you that all that we hope for and will certainly achieve [. . .] is more than prophesied by what has already been done, and more that can be done, by hundreds of Afro-American women.”¹⁰⁸ This passage implies that White listeners who were skeptical of Black women’s “extravagant” hopes simply lacked accurate information. Page 77 →Black women leaders such as Williams, however, had witnessed the continued progress of their sisters and were, therefore, confident that they “will certainly achieve” even “more than prophesied.” Early concluded her speech with a similar refrain, claiming that Black women’s progress since emancipation provided ample evidence to predict future progress. Similarly addressing the audience’s disbelief, she explained, “These feeble efforts at organization to improve our condition seem insignificant to the world, but this beginning, insignificant as it may seem, portends a brighter and nobler future.”¹⁰⁹ This orientation continues to the final line of the address, when Early described thousands of Black female students as the “first fruits” of their race. These girls and women augured abundant harvests of progress into the future.

Although she spoke about women of all races, Harper nonetheless also exhibited an orientation toward future action in the coming “woman’s era.”¹¹⁰ She likewise based her visions of future agency on past action, declaring, “To-day women hold in their hands influence and opportunity, and with these they have already opened doors that have been closed to others.”¹¹¹ Her conclusion reiterates the theme of futurity by exhorting the “women of America” to take advantage of “one of the sublimest opportunities that ever came into the hands of the women of any race or people”—specifically, to improve public sentiment and seek justice.¹¹² While admonishing women broadly to build the “national conscience,” Harper embedded within her argument a mandate that women do so to eliminate the scourge of lynching. Harper’s language in this speech echoes that of radical antilynching activist Ida B. Wells (who, as noted, did not speak at but protested the Fair) in her February 13 speech “Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Both women exhorted Americans to build “public sentiment” against the “lawless” act of lynching.¹¹³ Harper argued that women—Black and White—were uniquely positioned to undertake such persuasive work. Her forward-looking speech urges women of all races to prepare for increasing power and agency.

These six speeches thus enacted, demonstrated, and anticipated the agency of Black women. Although each speaker’s distinct position influenced her vision of agency, the themes of embodiment, self-determination, and futurity permeated their entwined messages. Their views of agency meaningfully foreshadowed the approaches to agency later developed by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black feminist thought. Furthermore, in all cases, they built their testimonies to Black women’s agency and progress on their accounts of emancipation and enslavement, illustrating in the Page 78 →process how understanding of the future is predicated on honest remembrances of the past. Agency thus served as the cornerstone for the critical memory work performed in these speeches.

In a 2015 essay on intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins claimed that “Black feminism’s immediate concern in the United States was to empower African American women through critical analyses of how mutually constructing systems of oppression of race, class, gender, and sexuality framed the social issues and social inequalities that Black women faced.”¹¹⁴ Although the term “Black feminist” did not yet exist in 1893, the group of six Black female speakers at the WCRW nonetheless deployed their understanding of history to advance “critical analyses” of “systems of oppression” that affected Black women. In a basic sense, their analyses simply reminded audiences about the millions of Black women who had been excluded from narratives of both Black male progress and White female progress. However, they also provided a critique of the contemporaneous discourses of history and progress that pervaded the Fair. Because the World’s Columbian Exposition had been designed to showcase national advances in the years since Columbus’s landing, the Fair articulated a vision of American “progress” that was coterminous with Whiteness, which was evident in the paucity of Black Americans in official Fair planning and performance and in the infamous exhibitions of Black “otherness.” Furthermore, these speakers argued that only Black women could meaningfully characterize their own progress—an argument that resonates strongly with Collins’s emphasis on Black women as “agents of knowledge.”¹¹⁵ Thus, the WCRW speakers offered a critique of White visions of “progress” by exploiting the ambiguity of the term and shaping it to their own purposes. Rather than assenting to the White colonial origin of progress in the Americas as 1492, they posited 1863 (or 1865). Rather than accepting a rosy yet racist account of enslavement, they demonstrated its deprivations. Rather than dismissing Black women as passive objects, they attested to their ongoing agency.

Considering the contextual constraints of the WCRW brings the risk and radicalism of their critical memory work into striking relief. As Jeanne Madeline Weimann pointed out, White organizers consistently made choices that depoliticized the event, rendering any remotely controversial topic “political” by contrast.¹¹⁶ This dynamic will be familiar to anyone who has tried to offer an account of the past that flies in the face of hegemonic memory: The alternative perspective is always deemed “political,” whereas Page 79 →the dominant account is portrayed as transcending politics. Against such a backdrop, these women’s allusions to slavery, rape, and lynching in fact appear quite bold. Furthermore, as Black women, they had to contend with the audience’s ignorance about and indifference—if not outright hostility—toward their lives and the lives of the millions of women they were asked to represent. This ignorance and indifference apparently emerged in reports on their speeches in the White press, as the Reverend D. A. Graham noted in his June 22 account in The Christian Recorder. Graham praised the Black women speakers but lamented, “Oh! How shamefully the white papers of this city garbled the reports of these colored ladies’ addresses in some instances they were not reported at all, while in others they were made to appear in a most ridiculous light.”¹¹⁷ Part of the task of overcoming that indifference required them to perform a “respectable” Black womanhood without completely capitulating to White definitions of womanhood. Finally, as “representative women,” they were expected to act simultaneously as exceptional exemplars and as ordinary instances of their race. Each individual speaker met these and other rhetorical constraints with imperfect ingenuity, crafting her speech with the unique resources of her own experience. At the same time, their shared position as educated Black women at an overwhelmingly White national event yielded similarities across the speeches. Examining them thus provides critical information about how the few Black American women permitted to be visible and vocal in the Fair’s predominantly White spaces navigated rhetorical challenges in order to advance their own narratives of commemoration and progress.

Reading these speeches within their historical moment and in conversation with contemporary Black feminist thought illustrates how Black women have long been building their own memories of enslavement and emancipation. Twenty-first-century American publics are still grappling with how the memories of emancipation and enslavement shape the nation and its racial structures. Evidence of this fact abounds, whether in the manufactured controversy about the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the abysmal state of education around slavery in the United States, or continued controversies over Confederate monuments and memorials.¹¹⁸ Similar to how the 1619 Project sought to “reframe American history” and “place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story,” the six Black WCRW speakers reframed history to place Black women at its center.¹¹⁹ Showing how the speakers used rhetoric to shape audience perspectives on the past both exposes the dogged persistence of Page 80 →White supremacist memories and illustrates how Black Americans have often advocated more accurate critical memories.

This chapter’s analysis of the WCRW speeches follows Ashley R. Hall’s outline for Afrafuturist feminism, which “places Black women across time and space in conversation with each other to theorize how Black women’s truth-telling threatens white supremacy.”¹²⁰ By reading the WCRW speeches in conversation with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black feminism, it becomes clear how the Black women speakers did exactly that. Working with the rhetorical resources at hand, they challenged White accounts of the origins of progress, reframed the experience of enslavement and emancipation, and insisted on centering Black women’s agency in narratives of progress. All these strategies contributed to their ongoing critical memory work. One can imagine how they might have even recognized that their “grand sisterhood” extended well past their historical moment to a “future-oriented community”¹²¹ of women who would someday manifest their visions of progress and benefit from the memories they advocated. In the next chapter, I turn to those future Black women to explore how they organized to oppose the problematic memories and stereotypes represented in the “Black Mammy” monument proposed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1923.